The Fibre Channel protocol communication standard has been developed to provide practical, inexpensive expendable means of transferring data between workstations, mainframes, storage devices and other peripheral devices. Thus, many Storage Areas Networks (SANs) include Fibre-Channel SANs utilizing the Fibre Channel protocol. In many development and test environments for Fibre-Channel SANs, manufacturers may be required to test the physical layer topology of complicated fabric test configurations. Some times, the test process requires human intervention, such as the act of the person physically pulling a fibre cable from an enclosure or a fibre switch and then re-inserting it during a specific test cycle. However, the test process requiring human physical interaction may be very time consuming and inefficient.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a device that simulates human intervention during the test process. It would be also desirable to provide a remotely controllable device.